Word: permafrost
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...million Yukon-Kuskokwim youth correctional facility will probably never open its doors. There is no state money to operate it. "So much of our economy has been artificial," says City Councilwoman Diane Carpenter, speaking of a generation of pork-barrel construction projects expensively built on pilings above the shifting permafrost. "Now that there are no jobs for young people, there will be social dislocation, anger and bitterness...
...They look more alive than dead." I So said Physical Anthropologist Owen Beattie last week of the three British sailors he and his colleagues at the University of Alberta had dug out from Arctic permafrost. Buried in 1846, the corpses are in flawless condition, down to the 19th century outfits and funeral head wrappings. The hands of one of the corpses, says Beattie, are long and delicate, like a pianist's. Petty Officer John Torrington, 20, left, Able Seaman John Hartnell, 25, and Royal Marine William Braine, 34, died after the two ships of Sir John Franklin...
...terrible of the Stalin-era concentration-camp complexes, stretching a thousand miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Sea of Okhotsk. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has called Kolyma "the pole of cold and cruelty." It was a place of massacre, where 3 million died, the men digging for gold under the permafrost, the women felling trees at temperatures of -56° F. Young men dispatched to the mines quickly succumbed to tuberculosis. Ginzburg, who acted for a time as a medical assistant, reckoned that "something like a thousand" died in her arms. Among her own ordeals was a 46-mile forced march...
...location and the size of the undertaking will make this one of the most complex engineering projects ever undertaken. In the harsh winters of the Yamal, roughly 150 miles above the Arctic Circle, rubber turns as hard as armor plating and steel rods snap like peppermint sticks. The permafrost is so thick during most of the year that the toughest of excavating equipment must be used to break through it; yet in summer the ground can turn into a quagmire that blocks both man and machine...
...Prudoe Bay) was just a lot of machinery hauled up and plopped down on the permafrost to make as much money as possible as quickly as it could. And the men were there only to make sure the machinery did its job. Alaska was not part of their dream. It had never been, for them, a goal, a destination, a frontier for them to explore as they explored new levels of themselves. It was just like Saudi Arabia Indonesia, East Texas, the North Sea--a place under which oil happened to be. They were an occupying army, bloodless mercenaries...